Jungle Fruit

I have to say that one of the things I enjoyed most about living in Yarina was all of the fruit we had to eat there. So when the guayabas come ripe here in California, I can't help but eat a lot of them, even though they are white guayabas, which I steered clear of in Peru. One of the houses I ride my bike past on my way to school has a tree that hangs out over the sidewalk, so I grab at them as I ride by and feast as I 'commute'. I have managed to find a number of other jungle treats here as well, but none of them are really any good. The mangos are flavorless (and never a very good variety anyways), I have found carambola (star apples) and pepino dulce, but they are always so unripe that I have never brought myself to shell out the cash for them. I do occasionally buy platanos or yuca to fry, and that is satisfying. What are some of your fruit stories? I know Josh has a good story about climbing mango trees with Michael. Care to share it here, Josh? I fell out of a Mamay tree one time while racing Michael out to the end of a branch for what we both felt was the perfect Mamay. I'm pretty sure we broke a branch out of Charlotte Zahn's tree that day, and if I remember correctly, we booked it out of there to avoid the wrath of the angry German woman. Which reminds me of a funny thing. Alex Lockhart took care of Charlotte Zahn's cat one time while she was away, and I went to the house with him once. On her bathroom shelf she had this little plastic toilet, about 6 inches tall. Curious, I picked it up to check it out. I lifted the toilet lid, and the thing squirted me in the face! I must say I did not expect that from the old lady who couldn't get out of first gear on her motorcycle and was always yelling at the kids in her fruit trees. So, this was supposed to be about fruit. Oh well. Go ahead, share a thought. Come, let us reminisce.

Flight Following

This picture is the best that I have on my computer for this story. As a side note – this is the day Milly started to sink during a frio while we were all at church. It happened when I was quite young, and I only vaguely remember that it happened. I think I got the picture from my aunt Alice.

Now about flight following. Steven and I worked in the radio tower afternoons after school and occasionally on weekends when we were needed. Our responsibility was to maintain regular contact with the pilots who were out flying, keeping track of the planes’ progress as they flew around the jungle. The job was somewhat of a bother because we never knew if we would be working until we called after school to see if any flights were still out. Inside the radio tower, the burden of the job increased with the very nature of radio communication. Our radios were very noisy and did a very good job of distorting voices to the point where you almost had to anticipate what the person on the other end was going to say if you were to understand them plainly. Then there was the stress that resulted from the occasional missed radio call. One day we lost track of a plane for about an hour and were really starting to sweat it, when the plane landed and taxied past our window. As it turned out, our radio had drifted and we were no longer using the same frequency as the pilot was. Another challenge of the job was running skeds. When the pilot or someone in a village needed to talk to someone on the center, it was our job to connect them through the radio switchboard to the telephone. What made the task difficult is the fact that a radio doesn’t transmit and receive at the same time like a telephone does, so the switchboard operator (i.e. me) had to flip the transmit switch back and forth every time the conversation switched from the person on the phone to the person on the radio and vice-versa. Skeds make the use of “over” at the end of each thought very useful, and some people were actually very good at it. Case in point – to this day whenever I receive a voice mail message from my Grandpa Nystrom, it ends with “over.” Others were not so accomplished at this detail of radio conversation, and that just made my job really difficult. As it turned out, however, missed bits of conversation were far from the most stressful thing that would happen during my career as a flight follower.

One afternoon I was alone in the radio tower when I got a call from the pilot who was on the ground out in a village somewhere. Although he had been planning on flying back to Yarina that afternoon, the weather was closing in and he decided it would be best if he spent the night out there. Naturally, he wanted to talk to his wife before signing off for the night. This meant that I would have to run a sked. I had thought that it was Paul Smith who was out that day, but when he gave me his phone number, it was quite plainly Jim Roberts’ number. So, I figured it was just the distortion of the radio that had deceived me into thinking that I had been talking to Paul, and I called Paula Roberts and told her that her husband wanted to talk to her on the radio. She sounded a bit surprised at that, but I just blundered on ahead with that sked. As soon as the conversation began I started to second guess myself, and after just a few sentences I realized that I had indeed connected Paul Smith with the wrong pilot’s wife! I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t think of what to do. So, I did nothing. Actually, that is not entirely true, because in order to do nothing, I still had to flip that switch back and forth throughout their whole conversation. After the “I love you’s” and the final farewells were said, I had to act quickly to catch the pilot before he turned his radio off for the night. “I’m so sorry, Paul,” I began with my stomach on the floor, “but… that was… Jim’s wife you were just talking to.” Then we started all over again with a second sked, this time with the right wife, and it all ended with one last humiliating phone call, apologizing to Paula Roberts and explaining that her husband would in fact be home for supper.

Kicking it off

Since I have started this thing, I will start by telling a little story.

Naturally, since my Dad was a lover of all things biological in nature (with the exception of snakes, although he did a good job of hiding it from his students), I too spent much of my time in Peru chasing down all sorts of fascinating bugs, plants and animals. One particular treat was digging up iguana eggs so that we could hatch them and raise the little critters, although in reality, they typically had very short lives in our care. Steven and I did a lot of digging for iguana eggs until about the sixth grade when we got smart and decided to save ourselves some work. We found a fresh nest behind my house, but instead of going to the trouble of digging it up, we put a cage over the hole that had no bottom in it, so that when the iguanas hatched they would dig themselves out of the hole and end up in our cage. It was a good plan, and for weeks we diligently checked that cage every day in hopes that it would be teeming with little green lizards. Eventually we stopped checking every day, and by the time our trap had done its job, we had nearly forgotten about it entirely. One of the iguanas we pulled out of the cage when we finally got around to it was so skinny and sickly that we thought it would never survive, but having seen so many iguanas die in my care over the years, I was determined to do all I could to nurse it back to health. I spent hours each day with my new pet and fed it everything I could get it to swallow. Then one day I went out for a walk around the track with my little friend who was finally starting to look healthy, and as iguanas often do, it climbed up onto my head and sat there basking in the jungle sun as I went walking. Then out of the blue, something hit me on the top of my head so hard it knocked me to my knees. I looked around me, ready to pummel whoever had hit me, but no one was there. For a moment I was dazed and confused, wondering what strange phenomenon had sent me to my knees. That is when I looked up and saw, to my dismay, a large hawk flying away with a small lizard dangling from it's talons. I was crushed and ran home to tell my parents what had happened, hoping for some sympathy, but instead... they laughed.